from the or-you-could,-you-know,-not dept

Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you're probably aware that the tide is turning here in the States more and more in favor of rights for the LGBT community. Interestingly, America rests somewhere in the middle on the spectrum on these kinds of issues, with plenty of world nations allowing for more gay rights and certainly many that allow for less. While this one-toe-in-the-water approach is perfectly reflected in entertainment mediums like video games, it's certainly worth noting that games in North America have begun to be more inclusive when it comes to LGBT characters and/or options in so-called "choice" or "sandbox" games. The Sims franchise was somewhere on the forefront of that sort of thing and more recent games like the Mass Effect series finally began to follow suit. And now it appears we can add the notoriously conservative Nintendo to the list of game developers that include such characters in their games.

See, gamers playing Nintendo's Tomodachi Collection: New Life noticed that this latest iteration of the game, which is very much like The Sims, had the option for the first time to have their male characters marry other male characters and raise children together. Hooray for civil rights progress, right guys?

One Twitter user claims to have contacted Nintendo's customer support, which supposedly said this is a bug and that the game needs to be patched. Online in Japan, however, there were many internet users who said they planned on getting this game only after learning of this bug—er, feature.

That Twitter user's story now appears to be confirmed, with Nintendo releasing a patch to fix the "bug", which it says allows for "human relations that become strange." So allowing players to be as gay in their virtual lives as they might be in their real lives wasn't a feature, it was a bug. And you're going to correct it. Here's another idea, and I'm just spitballing here, but how about the fix you release doesn't take away a bit of the humanity of your latest game, but rather extends it to female characters as well? It's not like including gay characters in a game, particularly one that is all about personal choice, means that somehow the game developers all agree in unison that all the morality questions are thrown aside. I happen to think that anyone who finds a problem with homosexuality is on the wrong side of both humanity and biology, but I won't dismiss the right for other people to have a different opinion. The thing is, none of that is the point. I played the Sims. I don't remember any more of an uproar over that game's characters being able to be gay than I remember an outcry over how you used to be able to order a pizza and then build walls around the delivery guy until he died (great fun, btw). Nobody who saw that done suddenly thought EA was supporting delivery boy murder and no one with a lick of sense thought EA was taking some moral stance on gay rights.

And besides all that, the reaction to the bug? Freaking positive.

In Japan, some Tomodachi Collection: New Life owners seem thrilled by the bug, posting photos of their gay couples online. In the images, male Mii characters ask each other to go steady, propose marriage, go on Honeymoons, bathe together, and raise children.

Well, no kidding, because the metrics of the debate are shifting quickly to be more inclusive. Even if one were to think that homosexuality was immoral, you can't lose your stones about it being included in a video game, unless you're also going to take the same stance on murder, violence, theft, cursing, lying, etc. Nintendo made their bones on a stereotyped Italian plumber. Now that Nintendo has decided to erase the option to be gay from this game, I hope to hell the backlash is as brutal as it should be.

I have received multiple reports (here, here,here) today that Amazon is now refusing to allow their Canadian customers to buy Kindle ebooks from Amazon.com.

Over the past couple days several of those readers have reported that many Kindle titles are showing up on Amazon.com as not being available to Canadian customers even though the same titles will show up on Amazon.ca as being available.

So far as I can tell, the only ebooks still available to Canadian Kindle owners are titles distributed via KDP, seriously limiting their ability to make use of their Kindles.

What seems to be happening is a push by Amazon to move customers from other countries over to their local domains, something that has been reported in Brazil, Japan and France. Other news has filtered in that this is not necessarily Amazon's doing, but is a result of publishers "moving" product to non-US regions where pricing is still advantageous (i.e., not subject to the terms of the settlements reached with the Justice Department in the ebook price-fixing investigation).

No matter who is at fault, it's the users that are getting the shaft. Amazon has only been selling Kindle ebooks to Canadians since late in 2009, but many Canadians have been purchasing ebooks through Amazon's .com domain since 2007. (Its .ca Kindle store has only been around since December of 2012.) Forcing Canadian users to set up a new .ca account means that much of what their .com accounts contain won't transfer over.

First, while Amazon claims that any purchased ebooks will be available* after a Canadian Kindle owner transfers their account that’s not completely true. The ebooks might be transferred, but I’m told that a customer’s purchase history is not transferred and the wish lists are also abandoned. That’s going to make it a lot harder for some readers to keep track of what they own and what they want to buy.

Oh, and that claim about the Kindle content transferring isn’t exactly true. Amazon.ca doesn’t yet support subscriptions, nor does it offer Kindle Serials. That means this Kindle content will be lost in the transfer process along with any back issues that had been saved. What’s more, Amazon.ca doesn’t offer music and video so transferring an account will prevent customers from accessing media they’ve already purchased.

After speaking to Amazon Kindle support they informed us that this change was not their doing. They said a change like this would have been made by the publisher only. One of the major publishers affected responded back to me saying, “It certainly wasn’t our intentional doing; although it may be a side-effect of our pricing model. I’ll investigate and see what I can do.”

For Canadian users (and customers in Brazil, Japan, France, etc.), it doesn't really matter which party is forcing the migration. The end result is a very possible loss of purchased content and a definite loss of purchase histories, preferences and a number of other small, but essential, perks that are part of a long-term Amazon account. This is going to hit the most loyal customers the hardest -- the last thing Amazon should want to do.

While there are many ways to route around this new issue, the fact remains that migrating a customer's account should keep it intact, especially when there's no perceived benefit for the end user. If this is publishers reshuffling their offerings to take advantage of out-of-US pricing, it's in Amazon's best interest to point this out. If this is Amazon's doing, it needed to have the kinks worked out before pushing it on its customers.

Today, we're making it easier for people to financially contribute to Ubuntu if they want to. By introducing a 'contribute' screen as part of the desktop download process, people can choose to financially support different aspects of Canonical's work: from gaming and apps, developing the desktop, phone and tablet, to co-ordination of upstreams or supporting Ubuntu flavours. It's important to note that Ubuntu remains absolutely free, financial contribution remains optional and it is not required in order to download the software.

By allowing Ubuntu users to choose which elements of Ubuntu they're most excited about, we'll get direct feedback on which favourite features or projects deserve the bulk of our attention. We're letting users name their price -- depending on the value that they put on the operating system or other aspects of our work. That price can, of course, be zero -- but every last cent helps make Ubuntu better.

As this notes, even if people don't offer money, their views on what's important to them can still be gathered, and that's valuable information for developers who need to prioritize their work.

In principle, letting people support new features of interest sounds like a good idea, since it gives users a chance to vote with their wallets. But it comes in the wake of a plan to let people search for items on sites like Amazon from within the Ubuntu operating system, for which Canonical would presumably get paid if purchases were made as a result. As the hundreds of comments on the blog of Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, indicate, this has raised a number of concerns about privacy and the direction of the Ubuntu project.

Some might see both moves as evidence that Canonical still isn't making as much money from the Ubuntu ecosystem as it needs to, and that Shuttleworth is looking to bolster income. Four years ago, he admitted that Canonical was "not close" to breaking even, and that it would "require time and ongoing investment" to make it do so. Given Ubuntu's place as probably the most popular GNU/Linux distribution, users must hope that Shuttleworth will still be happy to invest in Canonical, and hence in Ubuntu, for a while yet. Perhaps that's another good reason for Ubuntu fans to start paying at least some of the development costs under the new scheme.

from the market-research? dept

Craigslist is somewhat famous for keeping its rather antiquated design, and refusing to make changes. Even when well meaning fans have suggested ideas for improving the site, Craigslist has resisted, insisting that it's really just about design companies who are trying to get hired.

So that makes the following story all the more interesting. You may recall that Craigslist has gotten itself into an unfortunate and petty legal spat with the site PadMapper, because PadMapper dared to make Craigslist more useful, in part by putting Craigslist housing entries on a map so people could see where they are. This is a pretty small, but incredibly useful tweak, and Craigslist -- normally a defender of internet freedom -- suddenly turned into a protectionist legal aggressor and sued.

While there may not be a direct connection between PadMapper and Craigslist's decision, the timing certainly raises some eyebrows, and hints at the idea that Craigslist might just be suing PadMapper for improving Craigslist before Craigslist had a chance to launch the feature itself. Or, even worse, Craigslist thought it was such a good idea that it sued PadMapper while using its idea. That's not quite the "open innovation" model that Craig Newmark tries to champion.

For what it's worth, PadMapper's Eric DeMenthon is actually quite conciliatory about the whole thing:

“I’m glad something good came out of all this,” says PadMapper creator Eric DeMenthon. “Lots of people wrote to them about the PadMapper cease and desist [letter], so maybe that convinced them that it was worthwhile to do some mapping themselves.

Market research by suing those who try to improve you? Doesn't seem like the most effective system.

from the hop-to-it dept

With the launch of our new Techdirt Insider Shop, one of the new features we've enabled on the site is something we're calling First Word/Last Word, which you may have noticed appearing on the blog. The feature allows Techdirt Insiders with credits to help highlight key comments as either "The First Word" (on top of all the other comments) or "The Last Word" (beneath all of the comments, even if other comments are added after). You can designate one of your own comments, or feel free to designate a truly awesome comment from someone else.

Because this is such a new feature, I wanted to discuss a little of the thinking behind it. Despite blogging for well over a decade, I'm still amazed by how much controversy there is over blog comments. Some people insist that they're completely useless. Others spend many hours of their day engaging in discussion and debate in the comments. There are various attempts to try to "improve the quality" of comments out there, including banning anonymous comments, heavily moderating comments or doing things like having editors highlight the best comments. Others have integrated third-party platforms to manage comments, such as Facebook or Disqus. Gawker keeps pushing the bleeding edge with a series of commenting experiments that try to increase the importance of comments while decreasing the number of comments that actually get viewed.

Over the years, we've taken a very open approach to comments. We don't require a login to comment (though there are benefits to having one). We don't require people to identify themselves at all. And despite the default assumption some have that anonymous comments are bad, we quite regularly find that comments from anonymous users are some of our most insightful and funniest comments. To that end, we've always focused on trying to do more to highlight and encourage good behavior -- such as highlighting the comments voted most insightful and funniest, both with badges on the comments and in our weekly summaries.

With the First Word/Last Word feature, we're trying to take all of that a step further. We've seen how a single trollish commenter can sometimes (not always) derail an interesting conversation by getting in early and saying something completely brain dead, then watching (probably with laughter) as the thread disintegrates. Our expanded Crystal Ball may take care of that in some cases by giving insiders more early access to kick off the comments. But, not everyone's going to be able to rush in and be first. With "First Word/Last Word," Insiders with credits can help highlight one or two of the absolutely key comments on a story and put them in places of prominence to help define the overall conversation.

This is very much an experiment (and like all experiments could flop completely). But what fun is it if you never take chances? We've trusted our community for many, many years, and here's another attempt to trust those who become Insiders to help curate the absolute best comments for everyone to see. We hope you'll take part and help us develop an even more interesting and compelling comments section.

But Megaupload was not the only such service on the Web. Many companies have crowded into the online storage market recently, most of them aimed at consumers and businesses that want convenient ways to get big data files out of their teeming in-boxes, off their devices and into the cloud — perhaps so that friends or co-workers can download them. They include MediaFire, RapidShare, YouSendIt, Dropbox and Box.net. And there are similar services from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

All of these market themselves as legitimate ways to store content online. But they are inherently ideal for anyone looking to illegitimately upload and share copyrighted video and audio files. Most companies rarely, if ever, inspect individual files to see if the material they store on behalf of users violates copyrights, unless they are notified by someone claiming infringement.

And... by Sunday, reports started spreading of other companies that provide useful services to people who want to legitimately share files... shutting down or limiting those services. For example, FileSonic -- one of the most popular cyberlockers -- has basically killed itself by no longer allowing sharing, and only allowing personal backup. Another site, Uploaded.to, then blocked all access from the US. A bunch of other services, including FileServe and VideoBB have been killing their affiliate programs (again, which had been a good way for independent musicians to make money).

RIAA supporters are cheering this on -- believing that all of these services really focused on infringing content. But for the many, many artists, companies and individuals who used them legitimately, this is pretty troubling. Useful services are being shut down due to an overreaction on the part of the US government.

Again, this is exactly the kind of collateral damage that many of us were worried about. It's entirely possible (hell, perhaps probable) that the folks behind Megaupload went beyond the confines of the law. And, if that's true, I expect that they will lose in court. But many of us are quite worried about a few things: the fact that the entire site got completely shuttered despite substantial non-infringing uses... and that it's now creating massive chilling effects for legitimate and useful services within the US. Separately, as in the case of Uploaded.to, it's also splintering the internet, by having foreign companies put blocks on US internet users. These kinds of things were exactly what people have been warning about... and yet the US government ignored all those warnings (and probably still doesn't realize what it's kicked off here).

from the how-does-this-promote-the-progress dept

In one prong of the many-pronged attack that Apple has been making on Android, it's scored a victory at the International Trade Commission, where it's been determined that the idea of making a phone number in an email or on a web-page clickable to dial it is so special and wonderful that only Apple could possibly come have up with it. It's rulings like this that make anyone with a modicum of technology smarts shake their heads and wonder why we let clearly non-technical people make decisions like this. Patents are supposed to protect inventions that are non-obvious to those skilled in the space. If you put a 100 groups of five engineers in rooms, asking them to design various smartphone features and interfaces around things like this, I'd bet 99 would come up with a similar feature. It's just natural.

In the meantime, Apple's statements about the ruling are equally ridiculous, given Apple's history of copying others (including Android):

"We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Copying an idea and building on it is not "stealing." And if Apple had to build its devices without building on the ideas of others, it wouldn't have very much today. This whole thing is a joke, and it's rulings like this that make engineers have even less respect for the patent system.

from the the-death-of-software dept

The EU Court of Justice is now considering a lawsuit between SAS and World Programming Ltd. over the extent of copyright protection in software. We wrote about this last year, when a UK court ruled against SAS, but now it's been kicked up to the EU Court of Justice. Everyone seems to agree that WPL copied a feature from a SAS product, but did so in part by looking at SAS's manual, but without access to the software itself, let alone the source code. Basically, WPL just found out about a feature, and created it on its own. It's not even quite reverse engineering (which is generally considered legal), because they didn't make it compatible with SAS's offering -- they just recreated the same basic feature.

It's hard to see how this should be copyrightable. Can you imagine just how stagnated the software industry would become if you could copyright a feature on a piece of software, such that no one else could use it? Hopefully the European Court recognizes the problems such an extreme interpretation of copyright law would create.

from the taking-away-features-is-not-a-strategy dept

What is it about the entertainment industry that actually makes them think that it's a smart move to take features away from consumers? They seem to focus on building business models by pissing off as many people as possible, and then wondering why those people seek out alternatives. Case in point, visual77 points us to the news that movie studios are increasingly offering up feature-limited DVDs for the rental market, and then encouraging you to buy the DVD itself if you want all the features. As Consumerist reports:

Consumerist reader Joseph brought this to our attention after he spent $3.99 to rent the DVD of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World from Blockbuster. When he went to the disc's main menu and attempted to watch the Blooper Reel special feature, he was greeted by a screen telling him: "This disc is intended for rental purposes and only includes the feature film. Own it on Blu-Ray or DVD to view these bonus features and complete your movie watching experience."

This is the same thinking that leads the studios to seek to have rental places delay movies for a month. The entire business model seems to be centered on creating artificial scarcities that piss off people. Is it really so difficult for the industry to realize that they can make more money by adding value and actually delivering what people want?

from the take-a-lesson,-emusic dept

We've covered how eMusic (which had a fantastic reputation for a while) totally failed in communicating changes to its service, which involved increasing prices and taking away many valued features. The company tried to bury that news along with the fact that Sony Music would now be included, not recognizing that many of its users didn't care, and were pissed off at the way eMusic presented this as a good thing. At least some others may be learning. Ragaboo alerts us that online music site Amie Street is also removing some features (such as the ability to redownload tracks -- just like eMusic has done), but did so by admitting that it sucked and apologizing, but basically saying its hands were tied. They also gave advance warning of the changes. While Ragaboo isn't thrilled about he, notes that he appreciated the honesty from the company. Here's the email that he received:

"In several weeks we're going to be making a change to how Amie Street handles downloads, and we want to be certain you are fully informed in advance about this change. In brief, starting on August 5th we'll only be able to offer a single download of your purchased music unless you've encountered a technical problem.

Although most people only download their music one time, we've noticed that you have done so more than once on occasion. We realize that the ability to re-download files has been important to you, so it's understandable that you might be disappointed to see this no longer available. Unfortunately a number of factors beyond our control, including legal and royalty concerns, have made this impossible going forward.

We're very happy to say, however, that you can continue to stream all of the music you've purchased on Amie Street. That means wherever you have access to the internet, you also have immediate and unrestricted access to stream the entirety of your Amie Street music collection from your Library.

To make sure that downloading music continues to be as easy as possible, we'll be keeping a close eye on the user experience and making updates to the site as needed. The primary voice that directs any such changes will be yours, so if you have suggestions based on your experiences using the site, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us exactly what you like and don't like, and we can make Amie Street even better!

Peace,

The Amie Street Team""

Of course, the fact that both Amie Street and eMusic have removed the ability to redownload tracks over royalty issues makes you wonder what exactly is the issue here. Are record labels really demanding a royalty payment every time people redownload a song?